Frost

A winter frost has settled across the brickwork and windows of the novitiate building at the former Lewisham Hospital, Convent and Grounds. Photographed in 2019, the image records ice tracing every mortar joint and brick face on the building's exterior, the glass opaque with cold, decay already advancing through the masonry. The light is flat and still. Nothing moves. The complex on West Street, Lewisham, grew across seven construction phases between 1889 and 1927. The Little Company of Mary, an order of nursing sisters founded by Venerable Mary Potter in Nottingham in 1877, arrived in Sydney on 4 November 1885 aboard the SS Liguria, six women carrying five pounds. Within two years they had established a convent at Lewisham on land donated by Cardinal Patrick Francis Moran. The first hospital wing opened on 9 June 1889. It began as a women's and children's institution and was transformed into a general hospital from 1912, when male patients were admitted for the first time. The novitiate building is the subject of the Lost Collective photographic series. It is the structure where women entered the order and underwent their initial formation, part of a complex that also included the general hospital wings, the 1908 convent, and the Chapel of the Maternal Heart of Mary, a Byzantine Revival building opened in 1927. The broader site, built primarily in red brick with Sydney sandstone, is listed on the NSW State Heritage Inventory as a local heritage item under the Inner West Council. The Little Company of Mary vacated the site in 1986 after nearly a century of continuous operation. The Society of St Vincent de Paul took ownership in 1987. The hospital formally closed around 1988. The frost in this photograph does not distinguish between the decorative and the structural, covering everything with the same even indifference. Brickwork that once housed an entire institution's origin, now read through ice.